Dark Water (12 page)

Amiel shook his head, and when he closed the back door, he stood waiting for us to drive away, so Agnès made a careful circuit through the dirt circle where people parked when they came to hike the river. I kept watching him, and he watched us, long-limbed and silent, and the last thing I saw him do as my aunt pointed her car up the asphalt road was to remove from his back pocket a plastic bag, in which lay folded the white square of my letter. He didn’t hold it up or smile or wave or wink. He didn’t make any gesture at all besides holding the plastic envelope of my feelings so that I could see he had them, and then we drove away.

“I
t is always the pity when my husband hires young ones,” Agnès said to her windshield and me. “I tell him,
non
. The young ones,
non
. Only the married who are having other family here, like brothers and uncles. This one, he is new, non?”

She waited, so I said, “Yes.”

She shook her head. “America. All friendly-friendly outside—‘Hi! Bye! Have a nice day!’ Beneath: nothing.”

It was amazing to me that my uncle had persuaded this elegant, decisively critical person to leave Paris for Fallbrook. It had something to do with Western movies was all I knew. My uncle liked to joke that the real best man at his wedding should have been Clint Eastwood, who had apparently been the first dusty American to impress young, movie-watching Agnès Pleureux.

“Hmm,” I said. I never liked to hear her thoughts on America.

Then she launched a zinger. “You are in love with him,
non?
”

I had never thought of Agnès as perceptive, maybe because to her I’d never been worth perception.

“No,” I said flatly, inwardly ringing like a struck bell, and she shrugged.

“
L’amour, la tousse, y la galle ne se peuvent celer!
” she said with an amused smile. “The love, the cough, and the scab cannot be hidden!”

I coughed uncomfortably. It seemed to me that lots of scabs would be easy to hide if you kept your clothes on. I was going to argue that point, but she went on.

“It is not you, but the culture,” she said with what I think was fondness, though it might have been amusement. “The culture says you cannot have, so you want. You think my
maman
was wanting American rancher for me?”

I was glad we’d switched to talking about her. “I’m guessing not.”

“She tried to tell me that the tortoise cannot live with the parakeet.”

I assumed she was the parakeet in this metaphor. “Is that another proverb?” I asked. Agnès was full of them. You’d think the French spoke in nothing but taglines for Aesop’s fables. My favorite was the bizarre “You cannot teach old monkeys to make faces.”

“
Non
. We had these animals in our house.”

“Really? You had a tortoise?”

“
Oui!
Monsieur Pouf. He is still living with my
maman
. Do you know, tortoises they live for a hundred years or more? He wanders off, but we find him.”

A strange image came to me of Agnès’s mother, a beautiful freeze-dried flower of a woman in a gauze scarf, walking slowly through the Tuileries in search of a tortoise while my father passed by in one of his impeccable shirts, an impeccable lover on his arm. Would my father nod? Would he help look for Monsieur Pouf? I tried to think how many times my father might have encountered Agnès’s family. Had there been three vacations there before I was born or just two?

I thought of confiding in Agnès so I could hear her thoughts about my father’s departure and his attempt to lure me to Paris. I was afraid, though, that for Agnès the correct answer was always “yes” when offered an invitation to Paris.

We were idling at the place where Willow Glen met Mission Road. A bunch of animals grazed on the grassy slope beside us: pygmy goats, llamas, a miniature horse, a bristly pig, but no hinnies, mules, or misbegotten geeps. As often happened, cars were hurtling both ways on Mission Road, one after the other like missiles, and Agnès looked right, then left, then right, then left, watching for the gap that would allow us to dart out and join them. The car kept up its steady breathing of cool air on our legs, and I shivered. The angle of the sun illuminated the face of each driver in the cars heading west so that you saw, with weird clarity, each woman or man talking,
thinking, worrying, squinting, or laughing and then folding down the visor to blot out the glaring sun. I watched each fleeting person as if they were characters in a silent movie, and then I saw someone I recognized: a pretty woman in a silver-green car, her chin tilted slightly up, her brown hair loose and wavy around her shoulders. Mary Beth Farlow didn’t glance our way, just held the steering wheel with one hand, adjusted the visor, and raced past us toward the sun.

When we were safely on the road and headed in the direction from which Mary Beth’s car had come, I felt the strangeness of knowing something I hadn’t told.

“Young people do what they want always,” Agnès said, turning briefly to glance at me. She wasn’t smiling this time. Instead, she looked a little sad. “But I will tell you a saying my father told to me.
Amour fait beaucoup, mais argent fait tout.
”

I waited because the only word I understood was “love.” “Which means?” I asked.

“Love does much,” she said, “but money does all.”

O
n Saturday, my sentence was over. Still my mother didn’t get up from her desk or leave, and as the hours passed, I felt like a helium balloon in her hand, bobbing around the house. Noon. One o’clock. Two. At two-thirty, she started to change her clothes for birding with Louise. “Are you and Greenie doing something tonight?” my mother asked.

“I don’t know. I have to call her.”

“I haven’t seen her much. Did you have a fight?”

“No,” I said. “She has a boyfriend.”

“Is he nice?”

“Not really.”

She applied lip balm, sunscreen, and a hat. “Want to come with us? The lagoon is beautiful this time of year.”

“Nah,” I said. “Sorry.”

I could tell she was remembering the preschool me, the
one who cried and cried about being separated from her until finally she withdrew me from the program and let me stay home. Every day for the first week of blissful reunion, I clapped her cheeks, brought my lips close to hers, and said, “I can’t get
enough
of you.”

“Bye,” I called out to her from the porch, and she hesitated, then walked away.

I stuffed my backpack with bottles of purified water, a tube of antibiotic cream, some Luden’s Wild Cherry cough drops, and a roll of bandages so old they might have been Lavar’s. They were still pretty clean, though.

I swung my leg over the bike and headed away from the house, anxious to see Amiel, but there in my path was my uncle, blasting toward me on his motorbike.

“Hey, Pearl,” he said, stopping the bike and removing his helmet. “I understand you helped Abdiel yesterday.”

“Amiel?” I asked.

“Yeah, Amiel. Agnès isn’t too great with blood. Is he okay?”

I nodded.

“Hey, listen,” he said. “I’m supposed to take his bicycle to him, right? That’s what Agnès said.”

“Uh-huh,” I said. The backpack full of chilled water bottles pressed against my spine.

“You can show me where he lives, right? When did you become a cyclist, anyway?”

Part of Hoyt’s charm was his constant question-asking. He was like a caffeinated gambler at a slot machine.

“I was just going for a ride,” I said.

“Well, why don’t you ride
his
bike, and I’ll pick you up after you drop it off, okay?”

“Well, I guess I could.”

“Tell me how far it is and so forth, the address, and I’ll give you a head start. I’ll come get you.”

I shifted the weight of the bottles on my back and was alarmed by the loud bubbly sound they made.

“I was going to Greenie’s afterward, though.”

“Hey, that’s no problem. I could take you there afterward.”

“Well, it’s not …” I wasn’t good at improvisation. I paused as if I were working out a logistical problem. “You know, I think I could walk from where Amiel lives to Greenie’s, really. And then her mom could take me home.”

“You sure?”

“Yeah! Positive. I’ll just, you know, get a ride back.”

“You call me if she can’t give you a ride, okay? I’ll come get you. Maybe buy you a donut.”

While my uncle watched, I climbed onto Amiel’s bicycle. I waved goodbye. I rode over the freeway and up Mission with cars swishing past me every two seconds, and then I peeled away to coast down into river world, where I was about to break my promise to Amiel about not bothering him.

The oak trees along the road were black-limbed and the air was cold. Now and then a squirrel streaked across my path or a crow pecked at a walnut on the blacktop, flapping away just before my tires reached the bits of broken shell. It was so quiet I could hear their feathers like a woman’s taffeta dress.

I knew the trail by now, and riding was much faster than walking, so when I found myself at his bend of the river, I was panting. I walked the bike through the current and then pushed it over sand that breaded the tires like white cornmeal.

Now what?
I wondered.
Call out to him?

There’s something about trespassing that makes you feel larger than everything else, and clumsier. I pushed Amiel’s bicycle to the lattice of gray branches and considered just leaning it there for him to find, but I couldn’t leave his only expensive possession in plain sight.

“Amiel?” I half whispered. “I’ve brought your bike.”

I touched the wall with my fingers and listened to my loud heartbeat. He didn’t answer, and I stood very still. I stared at the branches under my fingertips, where tiny white cobwebs pillowed all the crevices and an orange speckled orb weaver ascended a line he’d just made.

“Amiel?” I called softly, and then I made myself look around the corner.

He sat with his knees up on the blankets that formed his bed. The fatness of the white bandages on his hand glowed in the shadowy room, but I couldn’t see if his eyes were open or closed. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I was worried. I know I said I wouldn’t bother you.”

At that he turned his head, but he didn’t answer.

I stepped forward and opened my backpack. I set the water, the tube of antibiotics, and the roll of bandages on the ground. “I brought your bike back. That way my uncle didn’t have to know. Where you live, I mean.”

All that was left to show him was the Luden’s cough drops. My mouth was so dry that I unwrapped one and popped it in. I held one out to him and he took it, but you can’t unwrap a cough drop with one hand. I sat down and took it back, and after I had untwisted the wrapper, I gave it to him.

“Do you want me to go?” I asked.

He didn’t shake his head, and he didn’t nod. He put the cough drop in his mouth.

I waited, and as I waited, I kept my eyes averted, as if I would only be invading his privacy if I
looked
at his things. I studied the trees and wondered if the bird that was singing was a finch or a phoebe, the dark sugar dissolving on my tongue. Finally, I felt so awful about the silence that I looked him full in the face and saw that he’d closed his eyes. That seemed peculiar. He was resting the bandaged hand on his knees, which were pulled up, and it seemed like a position you might sit in if you felt sick or hopeless. “Does it hurt?” I asked.

He shook his head, but he didn’t open his eyes.

Maybe it was because I was sitting there in his camp, instead of seeing him at my uncle’s ranch, that I realized, for the first time, the loneliness of his life. To me, the river was a romantic place where you could live like Thoreau or Laura Ingalls Wilder. But when I tried to imagine going off on my own to a foreign country and making a house out of scraps and looking for work and eating ramen noodles for every meal, the canyon seemed dirty and hard and cold. I reached out my hand to touch one of his fingers, but I was just grazing the skin when he opened his eyes and pulled it back.

He studied me with his face tensed. “
Imposible,
” he said, a more beautiful word in Spanish but just as final.

“Right,” I said. “You don’t feel that way about me.”

He closed his eyes again, then opened them. “Go away,” he said pleadingly. “
Por favor.
”

“Okay,” I said.

I stood up and blundered out into the sunlight, which reminded me of the problem his bike presented. I pointed to the bicycle, and he nodded. Holding his cut hand unnaturally still and stiff, he wheeled the bicycle to a place in the willows where it could hardly be seen. Then he turned to me, and I stood awkwardly for a few seconds, waiting to feel less horrible. He just stared at me with his solemn, narrow, beautiful face all sunken with pain and something else.

“Goodbye,” I said.

I held out my left hand as if to shake his left hand, and at first he didn’t move. Then he took my hand and held it as if we were going to shake like normal strangers, moving our arms up and down politely, but instead we were still. We stood like that, hand in hand, and it reminded me of what happens when you join circuits on a circuit board. The current travels and the bulb of light begins to glow.

Then he disconnected us, and the light went out.

T
his was the day that I discovered a very useful thing: the river is a huge crack in the landscape of Fallbrook. There is the civilized world of groves and corrals and houses and yards, all of them on hilltops because people like views, but far below those hilltops and streets, in a dark, winding cut, lay the river world. You could hike straight into that world through marked gates, like the one on Willow Glen, or you could just climb down into it from the yards on the hilltops. And I learned this by climbing
out
of river world into the backyard of the house where Greenie lived with her brother and her parents and a dog named Poochie that fortunately remembered me.

Greenie and Hickey were sitting on her back deck when I came trespassing out of the peach trees. It was almost fully dark by then, and the evening mist coated leaves and grass.
I had scratched both forearms, my shoes were full of dirt, and my hair felt like a dried plant sculpture.